Today, media content is used in a variety of applications. The examples of the media content can be both audio and video contents. There are certain features associated with the production and broadcasting of the media content. Currently, due to the use of new technologies, evolving industry standards and the use of open architecture in the development of the media content, verification of the features associated with the production and broadcasting of the media content is essential for ensuring a quality broadcasting of the media content. As a result, the media content developers, providers, broadcasters and operators need to carry out quality checks to verify the media content.
The media content developers, providers, broadcasters and operators apply various media content verification methods known in the art on the media content. However, such methods are generally limited in their performance since the quantity of the media content is generally very large and is to be verified for quality checks 24*7, however the content verification occurs on a single core which makes the verification process considerably slow as it takes a substantial amount of time for verification due to presence of large quantity of media content.
In order to address this problem of slowness in verification process, media content verification methods have been developed in which at least the portion of the verification process is performed on the multiple cores. One of the known methods for verifying the media content is a slice-based method. In the slice-based method, a frame of a plurality of frames of the media content is broken into multiple slices. The parsing of each of the multiple slices of the frame of the plurality of the frames of the media content is performed on a single core; however the decoding of each of the multiple slices of the frame of the plurality of frames of the media content is performed simultaneously on different cores. The slice-based method is limited by the factor that the improvement in the performance of the verification process is dependent on the number of slices. Thus, the gain (dependent on the performance) is not able to increase linearly with respect to the number of cores. Another limitation is that the slice-based method is only applicable to the media content having selected video formats (e.g. MPEG-2, H.264) and not all the existing video formats.
Another known method for verifying the media content is an alternate parse decode method. In the alternate parse-decode method, the parsing of a current frame of the media content, and the decoding of a preceding frame of the current frame of the media content occurs simultaneously on the different cores. The alternate parse decode method is limited by the fact that it cannot scale beyond the two cores.
It has also been found out that in both the slice-based method and the alternate parse-decode method, the scaling is limited and applicable only for decoding of the plurality of frames of the media content while the video quality analysis of the media content occurs only in the single core. Based on the above, there is need for common methods and systems that will efficiently verify the media content with various formats.